Monday, March 31, 2014

Installed Openbox in Kubuntu 12.04 this morning. I basically looked at my notes from when I installed Openbox in Wheezy KDE, installed the same set of packages, and then copied my config files right from Wheezy KDE into Kubuntu.

I had to edit two things in the menu's configuration file: the command for Chromium (in Debian it's just chromium but in the 'Buntus it's chromium-browser) and the command for Synaptic.

Can't find anything else to do; looks like everything is set up nicely. With Openbox, the keys are to keep good notes and to save copies of the config files; then, future Openbox installations are a piece of cake.

Added volumeicon-alsa from the repos, then added the following line to ~/.config/openbox/autostart:

volumeicon &

The volume icon shows up in the system tray; with the cursor hovering over the icon, the mouse scroll wheel controls the volume level.

A screenshot of my desktop, with the menu open and a few apps running:

The Free Software Foundation provides these “four essential freedoms” that software must respect in order to be considered free:

- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1).
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3).

The foundation created the GNU General Public License, commonly referred to as the GPL, as a copyleft license that developers can distribute their software under to qualify it as free and ensure that it stays that way.

Open Source Software

Open source software is software with source code that is publicly available under a license that gives users the right to study, change, and distribute the software as they wish [...] Like free software, open source software can be distributed for free, but it doesn’t have to be [...] Software available under the GPL generally qualifies both as free software and open source software [...] Chrome OS [and] Android, are open source projects, but they don’t satisfy the four freedoms necessary to be considered free software.

Software available under the GPL generally qualifies both as free software and open source software. If you use a Linux distribution, most of what you get through your package manager satisfies both sets of requirements.

FOSS

...any software that qualifies as free software could also be considered free and open source software,..

Like many people, I believe that free software as defined by the FSF is important; I fully support that movement. But like many other people, when it comes down to it, I'm gonna go with "free as in beer" when... well, basically, whenever I want to.

Some folks will say, "You can't have it both ways." Well, I think you can. I might avoid proprietary software, or just any software that is not FOSS, to a large degree, but there are times when free software isn't good enough. That's the real world. You do what you have to do.

I used Google Drive for the download, and used Unetbootin in Debian Wheezy to create a bootable flash drive. In the live session, I set up home persistence with the RemasterCC GUI; everything's looking good here, so far.